From the bottom of the tree
to the top of the funnel.
HometownQuotes already owns the hard part: agent demand, live-transfer ops, and two decades of ping tree relationships. What's missing is exclusive, first-position supply to feed it. This is the plan to rebuild that supply as an owned & operated channel, with Better Spender carrying the build, the media risk, and the day-to-day management.
Buying from the ping tree
Shared, delayed, cold, rented. Why the current model caps growth and kills resale value.
Owned & operated, rebuilt
Network → form → optimize → qualify → your subID. Revenue optimization at every step, all managed.
Answer the form, watch it route
Interactive: every answer re-prices agents vs GEICO vs external monetization. Set the goal, see the route change.
One lead, six revenue streams
Agents, live transfers, fresh overflow, click-table sales, the GEICO CPA deal, and RSOC. Interactive math.
The same lead, two worlds
Side-by-side: position, price, exclusivity, consent, data, and what remains when spend stops.
The platform we already run
Visual funnel builder, form engine, network module, Go router, AI-native build and optimization. In production.
Leads become conversations
AI SMS + voice engagement that books agent appointments and delivers the GEICO link mid-conversation.
Cody Solomon & Chris Aplin
The QuoteWizard form and the QuoteWizard traffic: the two halves of this playbook, reunited.
The pilot, not a leap
Who brings what, what HQ never has to fund, and a bounded 60-day pilot with clear targets.
The ping tree doesn't disappear. It changes roles. It stops being your primary supply at retail prices and becomes your overflow channel.
Buying from the ping tree
Every lead HQ buys today was born on someone else's site, auctioned in real time, and dialed by everyone above you first. Click any step to drill down, or press play to follow one lead through the tree.
THE LEAD'S JOURNEY · before it ever reaches you
The compounding problem: resale is dead on arrival
By the time HQ goes to resell a lead, every buyer on the tree has already seen it. Duplicated inventory → near-zero sell rate → the tree is a cost center only. Twenty years of demand-side relationships, and nothing fresh to sell into them. That's the asset this plan reactivates.
Owned & Operated: HometownQuotes
Better Spender runs this entire engine: platform + agency of record. Click each stage to see what happens there, who runs it, and where revenue is optimized. Your core business runs exactly as it does today; this stacks on top.
ADDITIVE, NOT A REPLACEMENT. Your core business runs exactly as it does today. HometownQuotes adds new channels and subIDs on top, and you choose how each one monetizes. MaxProfit doesn't get replaced. It gets better inventory: subIDs where you're first to dial, at cost, instead of last to dial, at retail.
Every answer changes where this visitor is worth the most
Answer the form like a consumer would. Watch the router re-price every destination in real time: agent demand from quoteengine, the GEICO CPA schedule, and external monetization, then pick the route that serves the goal you set. This is a simplified on-page model of the live AFFMAX routing engine.
One lead, six revenue streams
Today a lead has one way to make money. An O&O lead has six: agents, live transfers, fresh overflow to the tree, click-table sales to carrier buyers, HQ's GEICO CPA deal, and RSOC, and it costs less to begin with. Every number below is illustrative and editable: plug in HQ's real numbers live on this call.
TODAY · TREE BUY
O&O · NEW HQ SUBID
Revenue per lead · same consumer, two worlds
Bar = revenue per lead · marker = what the lead cost you
Show the math (table view)
Fixed margin, one dial
Nobody pays anything until after revenue has landed. Publishers run on revenue share, Better Spender runs on revenue share, and both are slices of a dollar that already arrived. One rule sets the slice: the rate follows whoever operates the stream. Anything HQ operates and collects, including HQ's own click-partner feeds, pays Better Spender 5%. Streams Better Spender builds and runs on its own accounts because HQ doesn't have them (affiliate offers, RSOC on DQ traffic) pay 25%, and HQ can take any of them over at 5% on 30 days' notice. HQ owns one dial: the publisher share. Drag it, and everything below updates.
Which way does the monthly check flow?
Only two flows run between HQ and Better Spender: HQ owes 5% of distribution, BS owes 75% of monetization. They net into one payment whose direction tracks the revenue mix. Publisher payouts never touch this: they are HQ's separate settlement with DA.
Example month uses a click-heavy mix: $95k HQ-operated ($75k HQ click walls + $20k leads, transfers, GEICO) and $5k Better Spender-operated. Three money flows: HQ pays publishers via DA (the dial), HQ owes the 5% fee on its streams ($4,750), Better Spender remits 75% of its streams ($3,750). The last two net into one payment of $1,000 from HQ to Better Spender. That number moves with the revenue mix, not the dial, because publisher payouts are HQ's separate settlement with DA. If the streams Better Spender operates grow, the direction flips toward HQ. And nobody pays on money not yet collected: settlement is the later of net 15 or 3 business days after the underlying revenue actually arrives.
Example month, line by line (updates with the dial)
Five moments money moves
Each bar splits the gross at the dial's current setting. All figures illustrative.
Settlement mechanics · how it runs every month
Publisher payouts are HQ's separate settlement with Direct Agents under the Network agreement; they never touch Better Spender's fee calculation, which is always a percentage of gross by stream.
The same lead, two worlds
Click any row for the drill-down. The right column is what changes when the lead is born on a HometownQuotes property instead of someone else's.
The ping tree doesn't disappear. It changes roles.
It stops being your primary supply at retail prices and becomes your overflow channel. And because your overflow is fresh, first-position inventory, you're finally selling into the tree instead of only buying from it. You move from the bottom of the tree to the top of the funnel.
AFFMAX: the engine we already run
Built by Better Spender, in production at affmax.com. Everything in this pitch runs on it today. Nothing here is a roadmap slide. Below is a live, clickable analogue of the visual funnel builder: this is how an HQ auto funnel looks on the canvas.
FUNNEL BUILDER · HQ AUTO (interactive analogue)
AI-native, not AI-sprinkled
Entire funnels on AFFMAX are built and edited by AI agents over MCP: forms, path flows, landers, offer walls, publish and all. AI generates the creative, checks it against offer compliance rules before it ships, and parses free-text answers into structured form data ("2019 Accord, the blue one" → year/make/model). The same discipline runs the optimization loop: every disposition and quality signal feeds back into routing weights and publisher payouts. That's the machinery this whole HQ plan plugs into.
Time to Data: minutes, not meetings
Most teams are bounded by how much of their own funnel they can hold in their heads: every new route, rotator, and flow makes the system harder to reason about. We built AFFMAX on MCP so our AI agents hold the full context of every funnel, form, and result. When we see something in your data, we don't schedule a sprint. We have a conversation with the stack and ship the change the same day.
This is what happens when operators who lived this business build their own tooling.
LeadsHello: the lead starts talking before the agent picks up
Our AI lead-engagement platform for insurance agents, in production at leadshello.com. It bridges the gap between lead capture and agent contact: instant SMS conversations and AI voice that warm the lead, book the appointment, and hand the agent a consumer who's expecting the call. HometownQuotes is already a supported lead-vendor integration in the platform.
Why this matters for the GEICO deal
The current playbook in-market is buying cheap tree leads and blasting texts at them: single-digit transfer rates on traffic that never asked to hear from you. LeadsHello works the opposite end: exclusive, consented, HQ-branded leads engaged within seconds, with the GEICO link delivered inside a conversation the consumer is already having, at the moment the routing engine says GEICO is the highest-value path.
This isn't a pitch we researched. It's the job we've already had.
Better Spender is Cody Solomon and Chris Aplin. At QuoteWizard we sat on opposite sides of the exact funnel we're proposing to build for HometownQuotes: Chris built the form that captured the intent, Cody bought and routed the traffic that fed it. Between us: the form, the traffic, the network relationships, and two production platforms purpose-built for this.
Cody Solomon
Chris Aplin
The proof you're looking at right now
This site, and every interactive demo on it, was built by directing AI agents, in about a day, alongside a full coverage analysis of our platform against this deal and a complete project workspace with 40+ scoped work items ready for the day paperwork signs. That's not a story about this site. It's how we build everything: AFFMAX funnels are assembled by AI over MCP, LeadsHello holds AI conversations with consumers, and the routing engine learns from every disposition. You asked who leverages AI seriously. This is what it looks like when the operators are also the builders.
One of us builds the machine that captures and routes intent; the other builds the experience that converts it. HometownQuotes brings the demand side we never owned: agents, live transfers, the tree, quoteengine, MaxProfit, and the GEICO relationship. That's the whole loop, closed: your demand intelligence feeding our supply engine, both sides compounding.
A pilot, not a leap
HQ is not being asked to fund media, build technology, or hire anyone. Better Spender operates as agency of record for the O&O channel; HQ sets the buy box and monetizes the leads.
Form technology and hosting, conversion-rate optimization, network & publisher relationships across email / social / search traffic, click-table build-out with carrier-class click demand (MediaAlpha-style), cross-sell offer access, RSOC, DQ monetization, compliance capture (TCPA consent, TrustedForm/Jornaya certs), and full channel management as AOR.
The buy box and lead spec, agent demand and sales team, live-transfer operations, ping tree relationships for overflow, the GEICO CPA deal (an owned asset earning nothing today), the HQ consumer brand, and the MaxProfit optimization brain, now pointed at first-position inventory.
No media budget at risk: publishers and the network fund traffic on performance. No engineering build: the stack exists and is live today. No new headcount. No long-term commitment to start: the pilot is bounded, measured, and cancelable.
The 60-day pilot
Performance-based and aligned: the channel runs as one shared P&L: leads, live transfers, overflow, clicks, GEICO CPA, and RSOC all flow into total channel revenue, with Better Spender compensated as a revenue share of the whole. No retainers, no build fees: we only earn when the channel earns. Exact terms are what we're here to shape together.
This team has run this exact playbook before: at QuoteWizard, one of us built the insurance form itself and the other bought the traffic to it: internal media buying and product, at scale, in this vertical. The stack proposed here is the one we already operate.
Let's pick the vertical and stand it up.
One vertical · one network · first leads posting in weeks · review at day 60 against agreed targets.